sixones

Zenses has gone through yet another change, I decided to drop the C++ and QT version because the smallest things were taking a long time and my experience with QT is very minimal. In the past I’ve always avoided C++ applications with a UI as the available frameworks aren’t the greatest.

This time around its being written in Java, and well they say the third time’s a charm, its proving to be correct. The Java version is far more complete than any of the previous C++ versions I wrote alone and this time I’ve been able to get help with the development to speed things. The new Java developer called Liliana has been spending time working on the device connection and track detection under Windows. She has also been implementing all the basic scrobbling logic whilst I’ve been concentrating on the user interface and joining the bits together. The current code is proving to be very reliable and we have managed to scrobble a few thousand tracks from our devices whilst testing.

Using Java has changed a few things though, as we are aiming to get a release out there as quickly as possible there wont be a Mac OS X or Linux version available for a while. This is because the current libraries available for MTP communication in Java are very limited and are mainly written for Windows, the ones available for OSX and Linux seem to be missing the `usecount` property on tracks. I have started work on completing an existing libMTP wrapper for Java but I’ve decided the user interface is a bigger priority so we can at least release Zenses to all the Windows users.

I am still not able to devote as much time as I would like to the project due to priorities with my full time job at Videojuicer, we are currently in the stage of releasing a new player and platform. But since I’ve been able to get help with the development on Zenses things are able to move abit quicker and I am still aiming for a summer release.

A lot of people have been asking for support for x64 (64 bit) based platforms, now unfortunately the library we have been using to communicate with MTP devices has been compiled for x86 (32 bit). I have tried compiling the library for x64 (using Visual C++ Express and the Windows SDK) but I end up with missing dependencies (ATLCOMTime.h) that are only available from the full Visual Studio package. Luckily though I have a full copy of Visual Studio Professional so at some point I will compile the library so it works for x64 based operating systems, but at the moment this again isn’t a priority.

A beta release is planned, and should be released shortly, hopefully we will be able to get a beta out to people before the middle of July. If you want to be on the beta just follow me, sixones on twitter and I will post details when its nearer the time / ready for testing. If your not on twitter, don’t want to follow me or would rather wait for the stable release I will be posting details via the last.fm group and here on my blog. I’ve thought about different solutions for releasing the beta and posting details on twitter will hopefully attract a smaller group of people so it will make things easier for us to fix any issues and bugs that will arise. Though obviously I wouldn’t mind if all 2,000+ Zenses users decide to join in and use the beta version, it would just make issues more unmanageable but we shall see. The plan is after a number of people have provided feedback from using beta the final stable release will work without crashing or problems for most of the users.

Until then though, here’s some screenies of Zenses detecting tracks from my Microsoft Zune. Please keep in mind that these screenshots are from development builds and as such there is bugs, one being that the track listing only displays one track but I did not want to delay the screenshots any longer;

As you can tell the UI is pretty raw, this is what detracted me from using Java in the first place but the user interface isn’t everything and in the future when we have some pretty icons and have spent more time ironing out the interface things will look better. The screenshot’s have been taken from Windows Vista x86 (running through VMware) and I was using my Microsoft Zune (the original model, other models will also work) as you can probably tell.

Btw my desktop wallpaper is a freebie from little-gamers, which is an awesome little comic.

For now enjoy, and I’m sorry a release still isn’t ready!